Doubtful loyalties David Robson praises a fictional account of the last years of Kaiser Bill The Kaiser's Last Kiss by Alan Judd HarperCollins, £16.99, 184 pp £14.99 (£2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222

12:01AM BST 29 May 2003

THE KAISER'S Last Kiss, says Alan Judd, "plays fast and loose with history". Real events have been conflated and whole episodes and characters invented. But there is enough historical meat here to add substance to what would, in any event, be a fascinating novel.

The action, admirably distilled, takes place at Huis Doorn, the Dutch country residence where the Kaiser spent the last years of his exile. It is 1940 and, with the Low Countries now under German occupation, the old man dreams of making some kind of comeback.

Princess Hermine, his pushy wife, wants him to return in triumph to Berlin, as a figurehead of the new Germany. The Nazis, naturally, are wary. A Kaiser who threw his weight whole-heartedly behind the Fuhrer might be useful; more ambivalent support, less so . . .

Martin Krebbs, a young SS officer, is sent to guard the Kaiser and sound out his views on Nazism. Later he facilitates a meeting between the Kaiser and Heinrich Himmler. Off-duty, he beds one of the Dutch chambermaids, not realising, until it is too late, that she is (a) Jewish and (b) a British agent. The story ends, thriller-fashion, with the Nazis desperate to track down the traitor in their midst and Martin torn by conflicting loyalties.

While the narrative is well-crafted, and continually engrossing, it is the characterisation that makes this an exceptional novel. The Kaiser emerges as a bufferish eccentric, who loves his country but, despite anti-Semitic leanings, cannot stomach the excesses of Nazism. He spends his days chopping logs, re-reading P. G. Wodehouse and maintaining his vast collection of old military uniforms. Himmler, subtle as a serpent, and already gearing up in his mind for the Final Solution, is drawn with chilling economy.

Best of all is the main character, Martin. Judd has imagined what it felt like to be an ambitious young SS officer, proud to be part of a revived Germany, faintly contemptuous of the Kaiser and his generation, yet sufficiently humane to feel the first stirrings of moral unease. The dinner-table debates over the future of Nazism are beautifully done: low-key in tone, but charged with emotional urgency.

If one of the hallmarks of a good novel is that the characters do not remain static, like figures in a painting, but are subtly transformed by events, then this is a very good novel indeed.